Home

Presentation

Understanding the functionning and the dynamics of living organisms
has lead in the last twenty years to the emergence of cross connected
areas of research like biologging and movement ecology. These fields of
reasearch are based on growing fluxes of observations,either in marine
or in terrestrial sytems, which have been made possible through the
broad development of electronic devices allowing to track and monitor
foraging individuals like mammals, bird, vessels, or plant gatheres.

Trajectories analyses is a meeting point between mathematics and
ecology. There are several mathematical formulations of trajectory and
many models to capture associated movement dynamics. Furthemore,
statisticians have developed various statistical methods and framework
that allow parameter estimation of these models given specific
conditions.

However specific features of monitoring data and of the various
underlying processes of movements that are used make often difficult the
straight application of existing operational methods. Furthermore the
assumptions made in such statistical framework might be too restrictive
from an ecological perspective and the models/approach would be largely
improved by relaxing some of these assumptions.

Therefore, stimulating the meeting of key issues in ecology and
relevant mathematical methods for analysing trajectories is still a
prevailing challenge to improve the analysis of movement and identify
the main future directions of models development.

The network objectives:

Increasing the interactions between research networks
developing or using statistical tools dedicated to the analysis of
trajectories;

Sharing the expertises and drawing up a state of art in
trajectories modelling (Hidden Markov models, semi-hidden Markov models,
Change point detection, random walks, etc.);